The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade

By Ann Fessler

“It would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the oral histories of these women and by the courage and candor with which they express themselves.” —The Washington Post

“A remarkably well-researched and accomplished book.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A wrenching, riveting book.” —Chicago Tribune

The astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the hidden social history of adoption before Roe v. Wade - and its lasting legacy. An adoptee who was herself surrendered during those years and recently made contact with her mother, Ann Fessler brilliantly brings to life the voices of more than a hundred women, as well as the spirit of those times, allowing the women to tell their stories in gripping and intimate detail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Release date: Jun 26, 2007
• ISBN: 9781101644294

Book preview

1

My Own Story as an Adoptee

MY MOTHER TOLD ME that on my first three birthdays she lit a special candle on my cake for the young woman who had given birth to me. She never explained why she did this for three years—no more, no less. I don’t remember this private ceremony, but I do remember that there were times in my childhood when she looked at me in a particular way and I knew she was thinking about this young woman, my mother.

Three generations of women from my family have been brought together by adoption. Neither my maternal grandmother nor my mother nor I have given birth to a child. I am the first for whom this was a conscious choice.

My mother was never told that she was adopted. For my grandmother to admit this would have been a public declaration of her own inadequacy, her inability to bear children for her husband. But my mother knew. She had found her birth certificate taped to the back of a painting at her aunt’s house. Her name had been Baby Helene before it was Hazel, and when she brought me home she named me Ann Helene.

My mother suffered her own private insecurity at not being able to bring a child to full term. But by the time she and my father turned to adoption there was no public stigma attaching to those who chose to adopt. In post–World War II America, families that wanted to adopt were carefully screened and represented a kind of model family—one with a mother and a father who really wanted to raise a child.

Although it is doubtful that families vetted through this process were actually any better or worse than other families, I was lucky enough to have parents who were loving and supportive and mindful of my development as an individual. They knew that they could guide me, but they also understood that I was not the sum of their parts. I was the product of two young people who had themselves, perhaps, been too young to fully understand the characteristics they had inherited from their own parents and passed on to me.

My adoptive mother and father were offered very little information about my biological parents. She was nineteen and from a big farm family of English and German descent. He was athletic, a college football player from a family of means. Their parents felt that this was no way to start a family.

My mother cried whenever she told me this story. She knew it could not be so simple. I did not. The story of that young couple sounded like the plot of a movie to me. I liked being part of this soulful story of ill-fated love, of having a mysterious past, of not being related to my family, of being my own person.

When I became sexually active, I imagined that if the worst happened I would do as my mother had done: go off to another town to a home for unwed mothers and return with a story about a kidney infection, or about an Aunt Betty in Sandusky who needed my care. This is what young women who got caught in this unfortunate situation did. Almost every graduating class had a girl who disappeared. Everyone knew where she had gone, and that she had most likely been told, If you love your child you must give it up, move on with your life, and forget.

It never occurred to me that those girls may not have forgotten, that it might not have been so easy for them to just move on with their lives. But then I had never gone through pregnancy and childbirth myself. And I had never heard the story from a woman who had surrendered her child.

Then something happened that forever changed my understanding of adoption. In 1989, I was attending the opening of an exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where I had been teaching for seven years. Not long after I arrived, I noticed a woman who looked very familiar. I had a distinct and clear memory of having recently talked to her but I couldn’t remember where or when. I asked several people if they knew who she was, but no one did, so I continued to look at the exhibition.

Later, this woman walked toward me from across the room and with no introduction said, You could be my long-lost daughter. You look like the perfect combination of myself and the father of my child. I said, "You don’t know what you’re saying to me. I could be your daughter—I was adopted. There was a long silence and I saw her start to react as I had. Eventually we compared dates, but they were one year and one month apart. She kept asking, Are you sure about your birth date? Sometimes records are changed." But I was sure.

We continued to talk. She asked me if I had looked for my mother and I responded that I didn’t know if I wanted to invade her privacy. I said, When you gave up a child for adoption in 1949, you didn’t expect her to come knocking on your door forty years later. And she said, You should find her. She probably worries every day about what happened to you and whether you’ve had a good life. I could see in her eyes that she was speaking from her own experience, and the thought that my mother might feel the same sense of loss was shocking to me. I felt guilty and empathetic and naïve all at once. Why had I never considered this possibility? How could I not know? How could everyone not know?

I continued to listen, realizing that I had never heard the story of adoption from the perspective of a mother who had surrendered her child. It seemed incredible to me that after forty years of life as an adoptee I was hearing the other side of the story for the first time. As I listened I finally understood why this woman seemed so familiar to me: the image of the two of us talking had been in my dream the night before we met. I went home and wrote down every word of our conversation. I started to wonder if my mother’s worrying had caused the dream.

A year later, the woman I had met in the gallery had separated from her husband and was living down the block from me. I began to wonder if she really was my mother but had not told me because I seemed ambivalent about a reunion. Had she left her husband and home to be near me?

My parents had always been very open about any information they had surrounding my adoption. There was a file in my father’s cabinet with Ann neatly printed in my mother’s hand that contained all of my original paperwork. As a child, I periodically opened that file drawer as slowly and quietly as I could to look at the papers containing my original name, a carbon copy of a letter on tissue-thin paper from the minister of our church congratulating my parents on their recent adoption, and records of what I had been fed during the three-month waiting period before my parents could take me home. Now I returned to that file for the name of the adoption agency. I needed to know what information I was entitled to. I needed to know if this woman was my mother.

The man at the agency informed me that because I was born in Ohio before 1964, all I had to do was fill out a form, send it to the Department of Vital Statistics, State of Ohio, and the department would send me a copy of my original birth certificate. After all the stories I had heard about sealed records and professional searchers, it never occurred to me that I might be able to get a copy of my records with just a phone call, a notarized piece of paper, and two forms of identification.

When the envelope from the Department of Vital Statistics arrived, I was in the middle of making travel arrangements for a lecture I was to give about my artwork in an exhibition entitled Parents. I unfolded the single sheet of paper and saw my mother’s full name, her place of birth, and her permanent residence in 1949. The right side of the form, where information about my father should be noted, was blank.

I located my Ohio map. The trip I was planning would take me within an hour of the rural community where she was born. So I allowed an extra day and set off through a landscape of corn and bean fields, and an occasional white house and barn, in search of a yearbook picture. I wanted to see what she looked like. I wanted to see if I looked like my mother.

When I arrived I couldn’t find the public library, so I went to the school. The halls were empty; students had left for the day, but teachers were still in their classrooms. I could hear the rustle of papers and blackboards being wiped clean. The door to the library was locked, but the teacher in the next room offered to help. He said the yearbooks in the library did not go back that far but there was a chance one could be found down in the main office.

We entered the office and he announced that I was looking for a yearbook from 1948, and the secretaries, principals, and vice principals all went to work rooting through their office bookcases. No one asked any questions. This is the rural Midwest. When they couldn’t find the right yearbook they wrote down names of people who graduated that year so I could call them, maybe go to their house and look at their yearbook. I felt sick. Things had gone too far—I just wanted to look at a picture.

I tried to leave but a man came through the door and they all turned toward him and said in unison, "Do you have a yearbook from 1948? The man said, Who are you looking for?" And they all turned back toward me.

I had to say a last name. I acted as if I were asking for somebody else. I tried to sound unsure, but he knew the name and he said her whole name out loud. And then he said, She doesn’t live around here anymore, but there’s a house with a business out on Route 30 with that same last name. They might know where you can find her.

I cleared out and started driving. I didn’t know where I was headed other than away from that school. I hadn’t wanted her name to get out. I just wanted to look at a picture. Then I realized I was on Route 30, the road with the business and the people with the same last name.

As I got closer I passed a road with the family name, the farm where I must have been before I was born. Then I saw the house and the barn and the sign for the business and I thought, I’ll just go in and buy something. I don’t know what. I pulled in, past buildings, past tractors, past corncribs, and reached the end of the driveway. But there was no business, just a sign out front, a number to call, and then a man came out of the barn waving. I had driven too far back into his driveway to pretend I was just turning around, so I rolled down my window and heard myself say, I see your name up there on the barn. You wouldn’t happen to know someone by the name of Eleanor, would you? And he said, Yeah, that’s my sister.

Then he started talking. He talked for an hour. He told me about her life, her husband, two boys, and a girl. But what he didn’t know was—there was another girl: two boys and two girls. He talked about growing up on the farm, the old Victorian house, and the banister they loved to slide down. Then he talked about her and how she was different from her sisters. He said, She would much rather spend time in the barn than help in the house. And he told other stories that sounded familiar.

Finally, he asked how I knew her and I told him my mother had lived around there when she was young and had moved away. She wondered whatever happened to Eleanor. So he went into the house and brought out her address and phone number. And when I left, I drove to the town where she had lived all these years, just to drive by, to make sure she was okay. I had always worried that her family had disowned her and she had lived in miserable conditions. Maybe I thought I might catch a glimpse of her.

It occurred to me afterward that she might get suspicious when her brother told her the story of a woman who had been asking about her. Maybe she had not told her children. She might be living in fear that I would show up on her doorstep next. I couldn’t decide whether I should contact her right away or wait. I waited fourteen years.

During the years that followed, I created several autobiographical installations about adoption. Whenever possible I offered space in my exhibitions for members of the community to display their stories of adoption along with mine. I was overwhelmed by what I read. The writings left behind by women in New York, California, Texas, and Maryland were the same. What the mothers had been assured when they signed the papers giving up all rights to their children turned out to be a lie: they did not move on and forget. I think my adoptive mother knew this when she lit those candles. I think three years was all that she could bear. She needed to move on and forget.

2

Breaking the Silence

You asked me why I agreed to be interviewed and I think it was because you were here, because you came here and it spoke to me—that’s all. There’s still that voice in me that says, Who would be interested? No one cared then, why would they care now? I was abandoned when it was right in everybody’s face, so I still believe that nobody cares. My personal struggle is to get beyond thinking I’m not worth caring about. I am here. I do exist. Maybe by adding my two cents I can help other moms who feel the way I do. Maybe they will find someone who cares.

—Suzanne

IN JUNE OF 2002, I began tape-recording the oral histories of women who surrendered a newborn for adoption between the end of World War II, in 1945, and the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion throughout the nation. These years were a time of enormous change for young women as barriers to equality and independence broke down. For the young men and women growing up in the postwar years, especially those of the baby-boom generation, this liberation from the past also applied to sexual behavior. And though premarital sex was certainly not a new phenomenon, it became increasingly common among those who had no plans to marry. For women born after 1949, the odds were that they would have sex before they reached age twenty.¹

Despite the increase in the number of young people having sex in the 1950s and 1960s, access to birth control and sex education lagged far behind. Fearing that sex education would promote or encourage sexual relations, parents and schools thought it best to leave young people uninformed. During this time, effective birth control was difficult to obtain. In fact, in some states it was illegal to sell contraceptives to those who were unmarried. The efforts to restrict information and access to birth control did not prevent teens from having sex, however. The result was an explosion in premarital pregnancy and in the numbers of babies surrendered for adoption.

Though sexual norms were changing among the young, the shame associated with single pregnancy remained. The social stigma of being an unwed mother was so great that many families—especially middle-class families—felt it was simply unthinkable to have a daughter keep an illegitimate child. These women either married quickly or were sent away before their pregnancy could be detected by others in the community. Between 1945 and 1973, one and a half million babies were relinquished for nonfamily or unrelated adoptions.²

I’ve tried to explain to my kids that it wasn’t like it is today. Nobody knew that much about birth control. What used to bother me a lot was I knew lots of girls who were having sex; they just weren’t caught. If you were caught, somehow you were different, and you needed to be horrified and shamed. I was thinking, But everybody’s doing it. Why am I a bad person now?

It was just totally, totally different. You didn’t keep your child. You didn’t. I knew one girl who got married and immediately divorced afterward. At least that would keep the people who talk at bay.

—Laurinda

Just about everyone who lived through this era has a memory of a girl from their high school, college, or neighborhood who disappeared. If she returned, she most likely did not come back with her baby but with a story of a sick aunt or an illness that had kept her out of school. If her peers doubted her story, they probably did not challenge her directly. They simply distanced themselves. According to the prevailing double standard, the young man who was equally responsible for the pregnancy was not condemned for his actions. It was her fault, not their fault, that she got pregnant.

This was in that period of time when there wasn’t much worse that a girl could do. They almost treated you like you had committed murder or something.

—Toni

The girls who went away were told by family members, social-service agencies, and clergy that relinquishing their child for adoption was the only acceptable option. It would preserve their reputation and save both mother and child from a lifetime of shame. Often it was clear to everyone, except the expectant mother, that adoption was the answer. Many of these girls, even those in their twenties, had no other option than to go along with their families or risk being permanently ostracized. For them there was generally little or no discussion before their parents sent them away. Those who went to maternity homes to wait out their pregnancies often received little counseling and were totally unprepared for either childbirth or relinquishment. They were simply told they must surrender their child, keep their secret, move on, and forget. Though moving on and forgetting proved impossible, many women were shamed into keeping their secret.

As soon as the time was near and we were going to do this interview, all these physical things started happening. My jaw doesn’t want to open and my lungs are all tight. I thought, I wonder why I can’t open my mouth. Then I realized, I’m supposed to be silent. I’m not supposed to tell this story. The secrecy has dominated everything. It’s so powerful and pervasive and the longer you keep a secret, the more power it takes on.

—Diane IV

I’ve never really felt like I could talk to anybody about it. You know, society has this picture—you hear about people giving their babies away. That whole terminology is just so misleading. I didn’t give him away. I think one of the reasons I don’t talk to some people about it is because they are so judgmental. Quite frankly, it’s not that society can’t understand, it’s that they won’t understand. People choose to not understand.

—Carole II

Afterward I never told, unless it was somebody I was very, very close to. I never opened up to anyone unless I felt that they would accept me. I felt like I lived a lie because people didn’t really know me. I was afraid that people would not accept me if they knew the truth. It was something that I carried with me for thirty-five, thirty-six years.

—Carol I

The secrecy has, in part, allowed some of the old myths about women who surrendered babies to survive. One assumption was that they were women who were having a lot of sex with a lot of different young men. In fact, a majority of the women I interviewed became pregnant with their first sexual partner, some from their first sexual experience.

I’m being very honest with you by saying I was a very late bloomer. When I got pregnant, it was the very first time I had ever had sex. Very first time. I’m sure I probably didn’t even like it. I went all through high school and never had sex.

My parents’ generation, that greatest generation, thought it didn’t happen to nice girls. You just have to know that’s what society and parents felt: nice girls didn’t get pregnant. But nice girls do get pregnant, and nice girls get pregnant now. People saw us as loose women. Well, I wasn’t a loose woman! It wasn’t that way for me. I didn’t sleep around. But that’s the label. That is absolutely the label. Oh, well. I could be called worse things. I could be called a liar. I could be called a cheat.

—Cathy II

Another prevailing myth is that these women were all eager to surrender their child and be free of their problem. The assumption that these babies were unwanted by their mothers is ubiquitous. The act of relinquishment seemed to confirm this, since it is commonly believed to be a personal decision made by the mother based on her lack of interest or desire to parent—a decision that is independent of social, family, and economic pressures. This misguided and simplistic notion has been hurtful not only to the mothers but also to many adoptees who believe that they were thrown away. Over the years, I have had many conversations with adult adoptees who say, She didn’t want me. Why should I want to know her? They clearly have no idea how infinitely more complicated their mother’s circumstances were and a short conversation could not possibly explain it. This book is partly a response to their comments. It is a story best told by the mothers themselves, and best understood within the context of the time period.

Chances are the baby wasn’t unwanted. It was a baby unwanted by society, not by mom. You couldn’t be an unwed mother. Motherhood was synonymous with marriage. If you weren’t married, your child was a bastard and those terms were used. I think I’m like many other women who thought, It may kill me to do this, but my baby is going to have what everybody keeps saying is best for him. It’s not because the child wasn’t wanted. There would have been nothing more wonderful than to come home with my baby.

—Glory

Nobody ever asked me if I wanted to keep the baby, or explained the options. I went to the maternity home, I was going to have the baby, they were going to take it, and I was going to go home. I was not allowed to keep the baby. I would have been disowned. I don’t even know if they had programs to help women and children back then. I don’t know what was available. I was made to feel very ashamed of the situation that I had created for myself and for my mother and for my family and friends, so I felt all those avenues were closed. I guess maybe I had to convince myself that I didn’t give him away; I gave him a way to have two parents, a way to have a home. Maybe that’s a cop-out on my part. I don’t know, but that’s the only way I can live with it.

—Joyce I

I never felt like I gave my baby away. I always felt like my daughter was taken from me.

—Pollie

Yet another myth in common currency is that these women did move on and forget. In truth, none of the mothers I interviewed was able to forget. Rather, they describe the surrender of their child as the most significant and defining event of their lives. Given the enormous number of women involved and the impact the surrender had on their lives, not to mention the lives of their parents, their subsequent partners and children, the fathers of their babies, and the surrendered children, it is remarkable that so little is known about these mothers’ experiences even now, decades later. This silence has also kept many of these women from learning about one another and understanding that their feelings of loss were normal and consistent with thousands of other mothers who had surrendered children.

I am shocked at how much it has impacted my life. I really tried to move on and forget, I tried to do what they said, but it didn’t work. I was convinced that there was something wrong with me. There must be something wrong with me. It was supposed to work; everybody said so. But it didn’t. No matter how many degrees I got, how many credits I had, how many years I worked, I was empty.

—Glory

The surrender was the beginning of a long cycle that colored my entire life. Your identity is formed in your teen years and if you take on this identity of a worthless, horrible, guilty person, then that’s going to affect you your whole life. Guilt was always such a pervasive part for me. Not that I was sexual, or not that I was pregnant, but that I let somebody take my child. That’s the guilt.

People talk about the worst thing that could happen to you is to lose a child. And no one talks about that in terms of a birth mother. What do they think that is for her? Why would it be any different? It’s in your cells, and in your guts, and in your consciousness, and in your heart.

—Diane IV

As I listened to story after story, what impressed me so powerfully was the commonalities in the women’s experiences. How the surrender was not only a deeply personal experience that affected the life of each woman but also a profound collective experience. Taken together, these experiences offer evidence of the lack of individual choice and the pervasiveness of surrender as a social phenomenon. For most of the women I interviewed, it was not a question of choice but of doing what society demanded—a demand that society has never fully acknowledged.

You know, it was such a long time ago and I started thinking, Just let it go. Just let it go and move on, yet I couldn’t, and I can’t. It’s a big issue to those who lived it. There are women out there who lost their firstborn child and never got to grieve. I can’t even put it into words. It’s a weird thing, this whole adoption thing where people think that someone could just hand their child over and it will be okay. Obviously it’s not. We’re still alive. We’re still here. We haven’t died. Our issues are every day. We live this every day. Every day.

—Suzanne

DOROTHY II

Iwas fifteen that summer. And I was in love with the Rolling Stones. My girlfriend Patty and I spent a lot of time listening to their music. One day my brother came home with his best friend. He introduced me to this guy and I remember being singularly unimpressed. But I noticed he stared at me in a way that no other guy before had. And it frightened and fascinated me all at once.

Meanwhile, I went on with my life as a Rolling Stones fan. And he started calling the house. He would call and ask for my brother. And we began to play this voice game where I would sound more and more seductive and he would sound more and more interested. And so that’s how we began. Then one day when he called, he actually asked me out. It was my first real date. I felt safe because he was my brother’s friend. I don’t even remember what we did that first time—probably drove around in his car. He had a baby-blue ’57 Chevy that was his pride and joy. He spent a lot of time talking about the car and all these little gadgets he had attached. And I kind of liked riding in that car. I felt really important. I’m fifteen years old and I’m thinking, Wow, this is what dating is like.

Then one night he decided we should go parking. I thought it was just gonna be a make-out session. But the very first time, he was already pushing me back in the seat and I remember thinking, Boys are a handful, then thinking, Well, he’s nineteen, maybe that has something to do with it. And I think the very first time we went parking I began to be afraid. That this was going in a direction I was either not ready for or in some way I felt threatened by. And yet something else took over—a kind of fatalistic inability to say no. And I am not sure to this day why this happened. I’ve wrestled a lot with that.

I began to be very secretive with my family, and not tell them I was meeting him. I can’t remember the first time we actually went all the way. I don’t remember how many dates, in other words, it took. But I do remember feeling betrayed, because he refused to wear a condom. I remember saying, I don’t wanna do this, because I don’t want to get pregnant. And he said, Well, I promise you, you won’t get pregnant. And I said, How are you gonna manage this? He said, Well, I’m going to pull out, and he explained what that meant. So he stopped trying to convince me and just took over and sort of pushed me back, and again I felt unable to act. I was stunned, dazed. I could not say no.

It was very quick. I was not even sure that it had happened. It didn’t hurt terribly—it just felt a little uncomfortable. There was this wet feeling between my legs and I said, Was that it? He was unable to speak for a few minutes and then he said yes. Then he said, You’re mine now. And I think in my whole life that is one of the moments when I was the most afraid. In my whole life. Even now, to this day. That feeling of being owned was horrifying. And that’s when I began to think, I don’t want to see this person ever again.

I began to make excuses not to see him. He was very possessive. I think we carried on for another month or so, and then I skipped a period. I was terrified. And I was just, I remember feeling like I was falling down this hole. I was just falling and falling and everything was spinning. And I thought, No, not me. Why me? My first love, and it wasn’t even a love. Why me?

I didn’t know what to do. I was very ashamed. This was not something that good girls did. Because I came from a very kind of poor family, I was more acutely aware than most people, maybe, about reputations and how easily they are lost. I knew from the experience of living in that small town that girls who got pregnant really lost their ability to have any kind of decent life. It was over for you. Your best hope in those days was to marry the boy and have done with it, and in the years to come hope that people would just forget it. The thing was, I was fifteen. I didn’t love this boy. This was 1966—abortion wasn’t an option. I mean, we didn’t even think about it.

He said, I’ve told my mother and his mother wanted to talk to me. Her answer was You’re gonna get married. She said, "We’ll help you get through this, but you have to marry him. And I said, I’m not really ready for marriage." It’s one thing to deal with being pregnant, and quite another to deal with being someone’s wife. They said I was selfish. They called me some terrible things.

I finally realized I had to tell my own mother because I knew she was my only ally. So he and I took my mother out to Carvel’s, which is this little ice-cream place in town. And I remember being really afraid of how she would react. I was the one child of her four who just might make it through school, might make it out of our little town.

It turned out that I couldn’t tell her. We were sitting in Carvel’s in the parking lot, and he had gone in and bought us all banana splits. As soon as I saw mine, a wave of nausea just swept over me. I had to escape from the Chevy. I ran to the back of the parking lot, and I threw up. My mother was sitting in the back of this car watching me getting sick. And I saw the two of them talking from my vantage point and I realized he was telling her.

She got out of the back of the car and walked toward me. I felt so afraid and I started crying. I remember thinking, Please, Mom, you’re all I have. Just stick by me. And I waited, and I watched her walk to me. And she just put her arms around me and said, It’s okay, babe. Because no matter what, we’ll get through this together. We cried in each other’s arms for about ten minutes, I guess. And finally she waved him away. She waved him away. She said, "Just go."

And she and I walked home from Carvel’s. We took this road, this detour that was one of our favorite walking spots. It was along the Housatonic River and it was a road that was lined with these wonderful weeping willow trees. It was the most beautiful place I think in our town at that time, at least for me. We walked with our arms around each other’s waist. The willow trees were blowing in the wind and we hardly talked at all. By the time we got home, I knew that she was gonna watch out for me, and that she was gonna make sure that everything was okay.

I had to start school. I was going to school and throwing up in the bathroom. I was absent chronically during that month of September. By then I was about six or eight weeks pregnant, I guess. It became difficult to go to school at all. I decided to go see my priest and tell him about it. He was the only male authority figure that I trusted.

I talked to my priest and he said, "You know, there is a way, Dorothy. And I said, Well, I can’t imagine what that is because I don’t want to marry him. And he said, Well, I wouldn’t advise you to marry him anyway, because he isn’t a Catholic."

I didn’t understand a lot of things about the Catholic religion. I was a convert and had only been officially a Catholic for maybe three years by the time I got pregnant. I didn’t understand a lot of the details—things like you can’t marry a non-Catholic. I said, So you’re saying marriage isn’t even an option for me? Is that what you’re saying? He said, Unless you can find a good Catholic man who would be willing to adopt the child, no, we can’t accept your marriage. On the one hand, I was glad, because this gave me ammunition to tell his mother, I’m sorry, it’s against my religion, of all things.

But the worst part was yet to come. He said, You know what purgatory is? We’ve talked about that. And I said, Yeah, I know what purgatory is. And he said, We can’t baptize your baby if you have her out of wedlock. So if you don’t marry a Catholic man there’s only one other option, or your baby’s going to stay in purgatory when she dies. She can never be baptized into the Church.

I was devastated. Here I am, fifteen years old, having to deal with the metaphysical complications of what happens to a soul when it passes from this earth if I don’t do the exact right thing at this moment. I said to him, "Well, what would you do? Like I was six years old. I said, What would you do? He said, I would give the baby to a family who could take care of those things. A Catholic family—a good Catholic family. I said, You mean adoption? And he said, Yes. I think that’s your only out in this situation. You don’t want to ruin your reputation. We can find a place for you to spend the last few months of your pregnancy. There’s no reason for you to feel embarrassed or go through the pressure that you’re currently facing with your boyfriend’s mother."

I was sort of enamored of the idea of running away, sure. He made it sound like this place he was going to send me to was a country club. He said, There will be other girls like you. You’ll be able to talk and have fun for the last few months of your pregnancy, no one will bother you, and you will be able to make an informed choice. He said, Nothing is final till it’s final, but I think you’ll do the right thing. And that was just the first time I heard do the right thing in that whole nine-month period.

So I went home after that long meeting and tried to explain to my non-religious mother what purgatory was, and how my child would end up there if I didn’t give her away. She finally just gave up on trying to understand, and said she respected this priest. She said, If the priest says you should go away to this place, then I think you should go. ’Cause I don’t have an answer for you, babe. I’ll help you if you want to stay here, but I don’t have an answer for you.

So for me the easiest thing to do was to go away. It was a running away; it was a place where I really thought I could go and think. But before I could go there a social worker had to get involved. And it was explained to me that the state of Connecticut would be paying my tuition at this home for unwed mothers called St. Agnes. I was told it was located in West Hartford, and that they would take care of bringing me there. I could stay until my baby was born and then come home. They would take care of the adoption and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything. Sounded wonderful, but it was very hard for me to say good-bye to my mother. I had never been away from home except for an overnight visit to a friend’s house. I was devastated to be away from her.

She had said, Write me letters. You won’t feel as lonely. So I did. And that started my little pattern. Every night before I went to bed, I would write my mother a love letter. I think she kept them for most of her life. And it kept me in touch with the one person who really loved me.

And I just, to this day, cannot get over that feeling of loneliness and abandonment and being in that place with so many young people. Everybody I saw was just a kid. I noticed one thing very quickly at St. Agnes, and that was that nobody wanted to talk about what was going to happen to them at the end of their pregnancy. They really wanted to live in the moment. They didn’t want to talk about going over—that became a metaphor for the birth. We would come to breakfast in the morning and we would look around to see who wasn’t there. Oh, she went over last night. She went over. That meant she had gone to St. Francis Hospital and had her baby. We would envy that person because she was out of jail, so to speak. But we were a little afraid, because we didn’t know what this was all about.

I remember that one of my best friends at St. Agnes was a girl named Brenda, who was like a movie star. She just was very glamorous and had long blond hair. She was one of those people who didn’t really look pregnant. She just had a little belly and she looked great. We were all so envious of her. When she went over, we were all very interested to know what she had. After Brenda’s four days, she came back to say good-bye to all of us. Being so popular, she almost had to. She held court in one of the rooms on the second floor, and we were all allowed to go in. We asked her all kinds of questions. What was it like? What was it like?

She had changed. In just those four days. She was very mature in a way that frightened me. She was not the same person. She looked fabulous, but she looked about four years older. She didn’t want to talk about the details and we thought that was kind of curious. If Brenda didn’t want to talk about it, it must not be good. She said she had a little boy, and she had said good-bye to him, and she hoped he had a better life. But that’s all she would say.